Pilots unconscious for hours – report
Experts offer likely MH370 scenario
Sydney – A catastrophic event soon after take-off, that incapacitated the pilots of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, is the most likely explanation for its disappearance, according to the first international report by air accident investigators into the disaster.
A 50-page report, by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), is the first official document to suggest a scenario for why the Boeing 777 veered off course and vanished 110 days ago while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew aboard.
The ghost-flight scenario put forward by Australia’s air accident investigation authority assumes that the aircraft was on autopilot when its two fuel-starved engines cut out after more than five hours flying far off course, and the pilots made no attempt to make a controlled ditching in the southern Indian Ocean.
The report, based on analyses by an expert panel, including representatives from Boeing, the British satellite firm Inmarsat and the United States National Transportation Safety Board, says ‘‘the unresponsive crew/hypoxia type event’’ scenario is the ‘‘best fit’’ with what is known about the last hours of flight.
The incapacitation theory suggests that MH370’s pilots managed to reset the plane’s autopilot on to a southerly heading in a desperate effort to get back towards Malaysia for an emergency landing, but became too incapacitated to complete it – causing their plane to keep flying south until the fuel ran out.
Hypoxia occurs when the body is starved off oxygen. The report said that such events on aircraft were generally caused by the failure to pressurise during the initial climb. However, a fast fire fuelled by the aircraft’s oxygen supply in the cockpit area has also been suggested as a possible cause of the crew’s incapacitation.
The official report drew on five recorded precedents, including a crash in Australia in September 2000, when the pilot of a Beechcraft Super King Air flew far above his intended altitude. His speech became impaired when he spoke to air traffic controllers, before he became unresponsive.
A jet sent up to observe the aircraft reported that the pilot and his seven passengers were not moving. The plane was chased for several hours until it ran out of fuel, spiralling to the ground in remote northern Queensland. No-one on board survived.
The ATSB document was issued to explain why the hunt for the lost jet is being moved to a new 60,000 square kilometre area south of regions of the Indian Ocean previously searched.